Canada’s ‘Prince of Pot:’ Returning home?

The founder of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, Marc Emery, now serving a prison sentence in Mississippi, has been approved by United States authorities for transfer to a prison back home in Canada.

Emery was busted in 2005 for selling cannabis seeds, by catalog order, across the 49th parallel into the U.S. After fighting extradition, he was sentenced in 2009 to five years in prison and has been serving his sentence at a medium-security prison in Yazoo City, Miss.

The marijuana left, not Canada’s maple leaf, was symbol for the B.C. Marijuana Party.

In a province where marijuana use is illegal — but usually winked at — Emery blew smoke at authorities both south of the border and in the Great White North.

He founded the Marc Emery Direct Marijuana Seeds business in the early 1990s, edited the Cannabis Culture Magazine and opened the Cannabis Cafe in Vancouver’s Gastown. The pot entrepreneur found himself featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Not amused, Vancouver’s stuffy then-Mayor Philip Owen once predicted that Emery’s operation soon would be “toast.”

Emery ran for Canada’s House of Commons — as a Libertarian — and later for the B.C. Legislature as a B.C. Marijuana Party nominee. The Marijuana Party substituted its own leaf for Canada’s national maple leaf.

U.S. drug authorities have long thundered against the drug culture of a province oft-nicknamed Canada’s “Lotus Land.” Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani inveighed against it, and in 2002 the director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, John Walters, journeyed north to speak at the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Emery bought a table at the Walters luncheon and heckled the DEA chief.

Ultimately, after prospering through brief local busts, Emery was arrested in 2005 by Vancouver police at the request of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA crowed over his capture. Its boss, Karen Tandy, claimed, without producing a scintilla of evidence: “Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada.”

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws never saw a penny of it, nor did Seattle’s Hempfest — the largest pro-legalization celebration in North America.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle privately cringed at hyperbole coming from the “other” Washington and professionally prosecuted the case.

Canada Press was first to report that the Justice Department has approved Emery’s transfer to Canada, which was confirmed by his wife, Jodie Emery.

Jodie Emery appeared last year at a press conference in Vancouver with John McKay, the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted her husband in Seattle. McKay became a leading advocate for Washington’s Initiative 502, which legalizes, taxes and regulates the sale of marijuana to adults for recreational use.

Correctional Services of Canada has yet to say whether or when it will accept Emery.

One longtime Washington customer of Emery’s seed business, at the time of his arrest, described service as “prompt, effective and courteous.”